Barometer | 1 October 2011

Up in smoke

A coroner in Galway has passed a verdict of spontaneous human combustion on a 76-year-old pensioner whose body was found burned in a house otherwise largely undamaged by fire.
Not everyone will be convinced, however — any more than they were in 1763, when Jonas Dupont published De Incendis Corporis Humani Spontaneis, an account of numerous deaths attributed to the phenomenon. Among them was that of Nicole Millet, the wife of a Rheims innkeeper who was found burned to death in 1725. Her husband was charged with burning her body, but was saved by the testimony of a young surgeon, Nicholas le Cat, who convinced the court that Nicole had spontaneously combusted.
One who was convinced — to some ridicule by literary critics — was Charles Dickens, who had a character in Bleak House succumb to the phenomenon.

Duty calls

A bar in Warrington has been criticised for a ‘two-bob Tuesday’ promotion offering beers for 20 pence and spirits for ten pence. It can’t be making a profit…

Political conferences don’t necessarily encourage people to join the parties, but which has the cheapest annual membership fee if you do want to take the plunge?
— Lib Dems: £12
— UKIP: £20
— Conservatives: £25
— BNP: £30
— Green Party: £31.20
— Labour: £41

The last slops

A convicted paedophile has threatened to take the government to court over the continued practice of ‘slopping out’ at Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight. Slopping out officially ended in British prisons in 1996. Yet, in practice, 2,000 inmates in nine prisons have no sanitation in their cells and either have to call an officer to let them out, or carry on slopping out.